DEATH CULT

Yukio Mishima’ tortured obsessions were his making—and his unmaking.

- BY IAN BURUMA

I once owned a photograph of Yukio Mishima squatting in the snow, dressed in nothing but a skimpy white loincloth, brandishing a long samurai sword. Mishima’s torso is buffed from years of bodybuilding, his legs almost spindly by comparison. The expression on his face is perfectly described in one of the Mishima tales that appear in a new volume of his work, “Voices of the Fallen Heroes: And Other Stories” (Vintage International), edited by Stephen Dodd. After a young man is possessed in a séance by the spirits of kamikaze pilots:

His usual rather weak features had taken on a manly, resolute look. His eyebrows were drawn together, his gaze was sharp, even his gentle-looking lips were closed tight. His face seemed just like a young soldier’s prepared for battle.

This was the countenance that Mishima adopted in many photographs taken of him in the sixties. A man who had been turned down by the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second World War for being too sickly had transformed himself into a beefcake, often pictured nude, or nearly so, and with a sword in hand, desperately trying to look fierce. Some of these images were stranger than the one I owned. The fashion photographer Kishin Shinoyama took a series of pictures, in 1970, that came to be known as “The Death of a Man.” In one image, the novelist has a hatchet in his skull; in others, he is drowning in mud, or has been run over by a cement truck, or—posed like St. Sebastian—has been tied to a tree and pierced by arrows.